Health2047 Inc., a Silicon Valley-based innovation company founded by the American Medical Association (AMA), has spun out its second startup, First Mile Care, a preventive chronic care company focused on prediabetes.
Health2047 previously launched Akiri, a San Francisco-based company developing a blockchain-based network-as-a-service platform for the healthcare industry.
There are an estimated 84 million people living with pre-diabetes (higher-than-normal blood sugar level), according to the company. With $2 million in seed funding, First Mile Care is building a platform that will offer people coaching to make lifestyle decisions that can reverse prediabetes and reduce the risk that their condition will develop into type 2 diabetes.
The First Mile Care platform is based on the proven National Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) method developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The coaching program has been shown to reduce the incidence of type 2 diabetes by 58 percent compared to placebo.
In an interview with Healthcare Informatics, First Mile Care Founder and CEO Karl P. Ronn described First Mile’s approach. “The CDC developed an approved diabetes prevention coaching program that works, but it just hasn’t scaled,” he said. “Approximately 200,000 people have taken the program in the seven years it has been available. That leaves 84 million who haven’t. The question is: can we scale it?”
First Mile has set an ambitious goal of getting half of prediabetic population into a coaching program in the next 10 years. “That scale of intervention would change the chronic disease landscape in the United States, said Ronn, a former Procter & Gamble executive.
To accomplish that goal, Ronn said First Mile will have to make the coaching intervention as convenient as possible. “If I want you to do something weekly for 16 weeks and monthly or bimonthly for six months after that, it better be easy to do or you are going to drop out,” he said. “It has to be within 10 minutes of your home. The reason we are called First Mile Care is that rather than trying to figure out how we are going to get the last mile from our hospital or doctor’s office to your home, we are more interested in that first mile, and we need to be able to make it possible for you to get that coaching in that first mile from your home.”
An easy way to model that is ZIP codes, he said. There are 42,000 U.S. ZIP codes. “It has to be as convenient as regular weekly shopping trips and that means showing up in all those ZIP codes,” he said. “I could need 40,000 to 100,000 coaches to handle 84 million people.”
First Mile is building a technology platform to build a matching system between individuals and coaches much like Uber does between drivers and riders. The platform will also track progress and provide feedback to users and use analytics to discover best coaching practices. “The tech platform tis important in matching people and tracking progress,” Ronn said, “but really I am trying to build a relationship between you and your coach so you can get done what you need to do. I don’t want the technology to get in the way of that; I want it to support it.”
Another reason the timing is right for the company’s launch, he said, is that Medicare has recently started to pay for this type of coaching program and other insurers are starting to follow suit.
So what is next for First Mile? “Our seed funding will enable us to prove we can do what we said we could do in terms of develop this coaching process in the wild,” Ronn said, “and create the on-demand system. In the process of doing it, we want it to be effortless and delightful for the coach and for the person. We are in a learning model to prove we can do it. Within 18 months, we will be scaling it up. “
